Girl Slays Beast
by Dark Manifest
Summary: Lady, Arkham, and a gun. That's what it always comes down to. Rated for violence.


_**All disclaimers apply.**_

_**AN:** Possibly a two or three-parter. Edited for accuracy._

The first thing is the smell.

Not just the copperironrotting sweetness of blood, or the smoky tang of sulfur, but the reek of other fluids, like a lavatory. It's a smell she never imagined during every horror story she yawned her way through, thinking herself fearless. Serial killers and ghosts and monsters and damsels needing rescue from evil witches and hungry dragons. Nothing was frightening before now. At four years old she knew there were no monsters in the closet. Eight and she'd never used a nightlight. Ten and she could outrun any predator and outbox any bully. Fifteen and she knew how to pull a trigger.

Sixteen and she's looking into her mother's dead eyes, her father standing over the corpse, a dripping dagger in his hands.

Mary didn't register dropping her backpack into the gooey mess on the once-pristine rug. A hysterical voice somewhere far away told her it would ruin the textbooks. And wouldn't the nuns have a fit over that? Bad girl, bringing bloody books to school. Do you have any idea what those cost?

She could have laughed, if she wasn't silently choking on the stench.

There's other things in the library, things that weren't here before tonight. Symbols and artifacts, a massive circle drawn in sand. And that _smell _that's everywhere, nameless.

But that's peripheral, that's the frayed edges of a rapidly unravelling reality, and in the center is a stomach slashed wide, spilling entrails, the mouth that used to smile slack and open, the eyes staring, staring, staring. One hand out towards her, palm up, as if beseeching. _Mary, Mare, help me, help your mommy, don't you want to help?_

Something's breathing short and loud, like an animal, almost gasping. She doesn't realize until she gets dizzy from lack of air that it's her.

The room tilts, refocuses, and her father is moving, straightening. The front of his clothes is stained dark, clinging. And there's something wrong with his face. Don't look. If she doesn't look he isn't there. So why can't she look away from the body? It's gaining weight and solidity, the nightmare following her out of her mind and into her life.

No monsters under your bed, just in your head.

"Rather a failure, I would say." The voice is almost eaten by the silence, as if inside a void. It's coming from the person who used to have her father's face. Now, he's a caricature, a nasty doppelganger that fit itself inside a human skin and distorted it horribly. "How unfortunate. All of this effort for so little gain. But I suppose that's only to be expected from a mere human sacrifice."

She's sure there's a reaction she's supposed to have, somewhere. Something better, more appropriate, than the word she speaks, hushed. "Papa?"

And he looks at her, as if he's seeing her for the first time. Red eye, green eye. Right eye, wrong eye. Just like her own. Kids used to tease her about it in school, before she learned how to retaliate, called her "Evil Eye" and pretended to be terrified when she turned it on them.

Now she wishes she could go back and tell those kids that they don't know what evil eyes _mean_.

"Ah, Mary," he says. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize you'd be home so soon."

Still standing there still holding the knife, the tick-tock of the old grandfather clock going insistantly somewhere in the background. If he asks her how her day at school was, she'll scream. She'll scream until her throat is bloody and until he _goes away_.

Instead, she tries to take a deep breath, realizes she can't, and says, "Why?"

_Don't look at the body, don't look at the body, don't look at the body, if you look, you'll forget how to speak, you may never speak again..._

Her father inclines his head, thoughtfully. Thinking about it. Not a spark of almost-forgiveable insanity in him. _Fucking thinking about it._

"Such is the world that you wonder, hm? You are still so very young. So very...unlearned. I have my reasons, dear. None of which you would understand, or accept, I imagine." He stops, and apparently that's all he's going to say. All the explanation he feels this..._this_...requires.

That's all. That's_ all._

The rage bubbles up out of her like bile, regurgitating all the foulness surrounding her. Mary doesn't know she's moving until she's already doing it, already remembering just why her mother leaves guns loaded in the rack on the upper left shelf, _because nothing slows you down, Mare, like having to put in a clip when you need to shoot _now.

In the back of her mind, she wonders how fast he had to kill her before she could get to the rack herself.

She turns, the Jericho 941 pistol in both hands, _(mom's favorite)_, drawing what she hopes is a steady bead on him, though she has the horrible suspicion that her hands are shaking, her whole body, that she might miss when she needs to be dead on the mark more than ever before.

He just looks at her, completely unmoved. "Now, Mary. You wouldn't shoot your dear papa, would you?"

Would she? Better question, _can_ she? Her finger is on trigger and she knows she turned the safety off. It can be done. Anything can be hurt, even boogeymen with no rhyme or reason to the terrible things they do. She can kill him and maybe it will hurt less.

Mary grits her teeth past the tears welling in her eyes. "Monster!"

She starts to squeeze.

His reaction is quick, too quick, inhumanly precise. Blood gushes across her vision and she stumbles back, hand over her face, her nose, pain and hot wetness blinding her for a moment, long enough to be killed. She waits for the blow to drop, imagines it would be a relief and fearing the darkness all the same.

But it never comes. Her vision clears, though it still seems red, fury, despair, something black coiling inside the emptiness where her mother used to be. And she sees him. And he smiles.

The beast _smiles_. Just like her papa always smiled at her. No jagged fangs dripping gore. It's not fair of all the unfair things. Monsters should_ look _like it. "Something to remember me by," he says before he leaves, "dear daughter."

Now, she's alone. Clock ticking away. Blood starting to dry. Sun moving across the sky, as if nothing ever changes.

Inside of her, the coil tightens, clenches a fist around her heart, beginning to squeeze pain away in favor of the bright pinpoint of hatred. And then she's on her knees, squishing into the blood-soaked Persian rug, cold and sticky on her skin. Disgust, terror, sobbing? Anything. _Some_thing real, something she can do other than sit here, gun resting on her thighs, staring into her mother's blank face, eyes on hers.

Ordinary brown. Not two-toned, nothing like her and Papa's. _"You take after him more than you know, Mare," her mom would say._

Mom is dead.

So the girl remains, red trailing down her face and dripping from her chin. Eventually, tears join the blood as well.

She promises herself that when she kills him, she won't be crying then.


End file.
